Networks of information handling systems (IHSs), such as computing devices, telephones, personal digital assistants, continue to grow and proliferate. These IHSs frequently store personal information such as the user's name, street address, phone number and email address, to make communication with other IHSs more convenient. One simple way to create an address book of personal user information is for the user of an IHS, namely a calling party, to manually input the user information of receiving parties in the calling party's IHS address book. However, a problem occurs since over time individual entries need updating when user information changes. Of course the user can manually update the address book in the user's IHS. However, manual updates take valuable time and errors may occur when updating manually.
Since manually updating the user's address book takes so much time and can result in user introduced error, systems for automatically updating user address books are very desirable. Conventional updating systems are known in which a central repository, such as a telephone exchange, maintains a database of up-to-date user address books for IHS users in that exchange. Each user's IHS can interrogate the central repository to obtain the up-to-date address of another user in that exchange.
Moreover, some conventional phone systems automatically update the address books of users who subscribe to this feature. In one such system, a subscriber's IHS locally stores the subscriber's address book in the subscriber's IHS. The phone system updates the subscriber's address book by automatically populating the address book entries stored on the subscriber's IHS. A telephone exchange maintains a central repository of address book information such as subscriber's name, street address, phone number and email address. When a call is initiated between a subscriber and another party in the exchange, the exchange confirms that the subscriber signed up for automatic updating and then transmits to the subscriber up-to-date address book information for the other party. The address book on the subscriber's IHS then updates itself with the up-to-date address book information received from the exchange.
Other conventional systems synchronize the complete address book of one IHS with the address book of another IHS, for example between a desktop IHS and a portable personal digital assistant (PDA) IHS. These systems can consume a significant amount of time checking all of the entries in the address book of one IHS to determine any differences with the entries of the address book of the other IHS. Moreover, these systems can consume even more time performing multiple updates required to synchronize one IHS with the other IHS.
What is needed is a method and apparatus for updating the address book of a user's IHS quickly without relying completely on a central exchange to provide a repository of up-to-date user address information.